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Abstract

Formalized knowledge engineering activities including semantic annotation and linked data management tasks in specialized domains suffer from considerable knowledge acquisition bottleneck - owing to the lack of availability of experts and in-efficacy of automated approaches. Human Computation & Crowdsourcing (HC&C) methods successfully advocate leveraging the human intelligence and processing power to solve problems that are still difficult to be solved computationally. Contextualized to the domain of Islamic Knowledge, this research investigates the synergistic interplay of these HC&C methods and the semantic web and proposes a semantics driven human-machine computation framework for knowledge engineering in specialized and knowledge intensive domains. The overall objective is to augment the process of automated knowledge extraction and text mining methods using a hybrid approach for combining collective intelligence of the crowds with that of experts to facilitate activities in formalized knowledge engineering - thus overcoming the so-called knowledge acquisition bottleneck.
As part of this framework, we design and implement formal and scalable knowledge acquisition workflows through the application of semantics driven crowdsourcing methodology and its specialized derivative, called learnersourcing. We evaluate these methods and workflows for a range of knowledge engineering tasks including thematic classification, thematic disambiguation, thematic annotation and contextual interlinking for two primary Islamic texts, namely the Qur'an and the books of Prophetic narrations called the Hadith. This is done at various levels of granularity, including atomic and composite task workflows, that existing research fails to address. We leverage primarily upon students and learners engaging in typical knowledge seeking and learning scenarios. The chosen method ensures annotation reliability by introducing an 'expert sourcing' workflow tightly integrated within the system. Therefore, quantitative measures of ensuring annotation quality are woven into the very fabric of the human computation framework. The results of our evaluation demonstrate that our proposed methods are robust and are capable of generating high quality and reliable annotations, while significantly reducing the need for expert contributions.